Syracuse basketball players discuss their futures after loss to SMU: ‘I’ve brainstormed some ideas’

Charlotte, N.C. – They were asked the kind of questions every college basketball player with remaining eligibility gets asked once their seasons end.

Where do they go from here?

Postgame locker rooms after a final defeat do not provide the best circumstances to answer those questions. Naithan George and Sadiq White pointed out the obvious: They had just lost a game.

And so much can and will change between Tuesday afternoon and whenever they arrive at a 2026-27 destination.

“I’m still trying to soak in that we just lost,” White said.

With the transfer portal so prevalent in building college rosters, what happens in the offseason is as momentous as what happens during the season.

Donnie Freeman, one of Syracuse’s two returning players from a year ago, held court with reporters in SU’s Spectrum Center locker room. The SU forward reflected on his Orange career, his two years of injuries, the maddening unraveling of Syracuse this season, his appreciation for Adrian Autry.

He has not, he said, thought much about where he might be next year.

“Not even a little bit,” he said. “I mean, I’ve brainstormed some ideas, but I don’t know. I’m just right now gonna take some time to decompress and kinda get my thoughts aligned and just see what’s in store for me. I want to take this time to just kind of get myself together and just see what happens, honestly.”

Nate Kingz, who scored 25 points for SU on Tuesday, said a few days earlier in Syracuse that he would like to return to SU should the NCAA approve his application for a waiver for another year. Like everybody else, he is in something of a holding pattern.

Tyler Betsey, who scored 15 points on 5-of-8 shooting from the 3-point line, said he had no idea what the future might hold for him.

“It’s just talking to my people, you know,” he said. “I have good people around me that give me advice but they let me run my own race, make my own decisions. So just talking to them, getting feedback from them, talking to Coach Red, talking to people at ‘Cuse and see what’s going on. Then make a decision whatever it is from there.”

George, the SU point guard from Toronto, preferred not to discuss his future.

White, the last Orange player to leave the locker room before it closed, offered a hasty reply.

“As of now, I mean, go with the flow, man,” White said. “Yes, I wanna come back to ‘Cuse, but we’ll see what my future holds for me.”

Kiyan Anthony, because of an injury that ruled him out of Tuesday’s game, was not required to be in SU’s postgame locker room.

SMU defeated SU 86-69 and moved on to the ACC Tournament quarterfinals.

The Orange, 15-17 on the year, headed home.

Syracuse players, as a whole, were in a reflective mood afterward.

Mostly, they tried to process the finality of it, the swift end to a season of struggle. They talked about the bonds they made this year, their love for Autry, their incomprehension about how the season went down.

“It’s unfortunate how things started to unravel,” Freeman said. “We worked so hard. And I feel like we deserve better than the outcome we got.”